Tuesday, September 11, 2007

Microsoft Attacks Google Apps

Microsoft issued a series of questions customers of the Google Apps framework (like Google Calendar, Gmail, and Google Docs) should ask. Microsoft is of course a biased critic, also being a competitor in the office niche, but some of their items raise questions worth asking. Other arguments contain holes themselves. Here’s the full list of GAPE (Google Apps Premier Edition) criticism:

1. Microsoft asks: How many enterprise users does GAPE really have?
2. Google often releases incomplete products to then issue incremental improvements without any official schedule – this is not what enterprise users want, says Microsoft.
3. Microsoft argues Google says GAPE is a low cost office option, but if enterprises still need to support MS Office, they will then actually have additional costs and complexity.
4. Google makes most of their revenue via ads, with other services only on the 1% fringe, says Microsoft, wondering if Google will shut down their office products line if it doesn’t generate the right revenue.
5. Microsoft says Google Apps are mostly usable for non-power users and have less features than MS Office tools. Also, they mostly require the company to be always-online.
6. Google Apps “don’t have essential document creation features like support for headers, footers, table of content, footnotes etc.”.
7. MS says that Google defines a downtime for Gmail (for which they promise 99.9% uptime) as over 10 consecutive minutes of being unreachable. What, MS asks, if Google is down for 7 minutes every hour of a day?
8. Google’s direct tech support has limited opening hours. MS writes, “... M-F 1AM-6PM PST – are these the new hours of global business?”
9. Microsoft writes that Google argues most people only use 10% of the features in today’s office products. Microsoft argues that however not everyone uses the same 10%.
10. As Google rolls out features on a constant basis, Microsoft says customers lose control of planning the update, and also aren’t able to sufficiently train their employees.

[Via Search Engine Land.]

Microsoft Attacks Google ... by Philipp Lenssen | Comments (18)

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